Page - 94 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

94 siting futurity as part of a fundraising effort for the statue project. As Yasmin Sabina Khan tells us, Lazarus was at the time “involved in aid- ing refugees to New York who had fled anti-Semitic pograms in eastern Europe. These refugees were forced to live in conditions that the wealthy Lazarus had never experienced. She saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue” (Khan 2010, 165–66). A dozen songs later, the hopeful future Emma Lazarus had worked hard to make possible is also a thing of the past, and together with Newton we find ourselves distressingly mired in the present. According to Tony Visconti, “Valentine’s Day” was inspired by “a spate of high school shootings in America” (October 2019, 110), a spate that has in the meantime spread to malls, nightclubs, mosques, and even food festivals (Winton et al. 2019). The year of the song’s release on The Next Day saw the birth of a grassroots response to the latest headline-grabbing form of killing “made in the USA,” namely, that of young black men by white police officers. The year 2013 was the year #Black- LivesMatter started after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. Because of the too many shootings since then, the movement has taken on international proportions, with branches in Australia, Canada and the UK that point to the settler colonial foundation of the phenomenon it opposes. Lazarus as Necropolitical Sovereignty: Decoupling Sadism from Masochism The violent taking of life is what necropolitics is all about. As Achille Mbembe introduced it in an influential article in Public Culture, necropolitics is “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dic- tate who may live and who must die” (Mbembe 2003, 11). There has been growing interest in the necropolitical as a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death, manifested